1. Field Of The Invention
The present invention relates to the use of computer systems to facilitate the recommendation of goods or services utilizing a distributed network such as the Internet, specifically to provide recommendations of goods or services that may be of interest to potential customers based on a potential customers"" selection of goods or services and a database of previous customer history with respect to the selected goods or services.
2. Description Of The Background Art
Providing recommendations of goods or services of interest to customers in a computer system environment has been based on demographic profiles and usually requires extensive customer participation and divulgence of personal information (for example, the input of: age, profession, hobbies, gender, . . . ) to create a user profile, which is then compared against other user profiles to determine possible items of interest to the user. The need for extensive customer input limits the appeal of these feedback systems because they require the user to expend substantial time and effort in addition to revealing personal details in order to obtain the requested information.
The present invention allows potential customers to utilize a computer system interfaced with a distributed network to obtain recommendations of goods or services that may be of interest to them while substantially reducing the degree of customer input required in comparison to prior art systems. Instead of relying on the personal information provided by each potential customer as a basis for determining recommendations, the subject invention utilizes a customer activity history database to facilitate the determination of recommendations.
A method for recommending goods or services is provided which allows the user of a computer system connected to a distributed network such as the Internet to receive recommendations of goods or services of potential interest based on a particular good or service selected by the user and previous customer buying history. The previous customer buying history is assembled by passively tracking and retaining or storing all purchasing decisions by previous customers.
The user first selects a particular good or service he may be interested in obtaining. This selection is treated as filter data input to a host computers"" data processor. The data processor then compares this input data with a customer activity history database to determine if there are any possible goods or services that can be recommended to the user. If there are possible recommendations the user can choose to have those goods or services recommended to him by the system. The data processor then utilizes the filter data input and the customer history database to determine all of the customers who have purchased the particular good or service selected by the user and all the goods or services those customers-have purchased. The goods or services purchased in common by this group of customers are returned as filtered output data and displayed to the user as recommended goods or services.
According to another aspect of the invention, a confidence factor indicating the level of confidence in the strength of the recommendation may be provided.